I'm a defense writer, avid gamer and history buff. I'm currently a contributing editor for Foreign Policy Magazine, a writer for the War is Boring defense blog and of course a contributor at Forbes. My work has also appeared in the Washingon Post,Slate, Defense News, USA Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer and other fine publications. I'm a contrarian, an iconoclast, and I know that not everyone will agree with me. That means I must be doing something right. Follow me on Facebook or Twitter at @mipeck1.

Interstellar Aircraft Carriers and Science Fiction Naval Warfare

What would a naval battle in space be like? Would it resemble warfare on Earth, with spaceships or battleships, or would it be waged with tactics and technologies that we can’t even imagine?

While I can only speculate, I was fortunate enough to speak with someone who can speculate better than I can. I interviewed Chris Weuve, professional naval analyst, avid science-fiction fan and wargamer, on how realistically naval warfare is portrayed in SF. You can read the interview here, but among other points, Chris notes how often SF fleet battles mimic some historical period on Earth, with spaceships resembling Napoleonic frigates, WWII submarines or modern American aircraft carriers.

I’m neither a naval officer, physicist nor engineer. Compared to the stellar knowledge of a Chris Weuve, I’m just a white dwarf. But I do write about military affairs, and I am an SF fan (Original Star Trek and Deep Space 9 are my favorites, as are the Lensman series and C.J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station novels). Rather than offer answers that would only be speculation in disguise, I’m going to pose a few of my own questions about how warfare in space would be fought:

1. Why will there be war in space? On Planet Earth, we fight for many reasons: resources, ideology, power, fear. But what would be the logic of waging interstellar war? The most compelling motive would seem to be resources. Yet if it’s resources, the universe is vast and might offer enough to satisfy everyone. Or, it might be easier to develop a substitute than wage a war across many light years. SF weapons are often depicted as smart, which implies precision targeting, yet also of immense destructive power. If the belligerents are hurtling missiles at each other that travel faster than light, it might be difficult to prosecute a war for resources without destroying the planets that have the resources they covet. As for motives like fear, preventative war is most attractive if the attacker believes he can win quickly and cheaply. Judging by the cost of present-day missile defense, this seems a long shot.

2. Can anyone afford war in space?Napoleon said that an army marches on its stomach, but after years of writing about the U.S. military, I’ve concluded that an army marches on its wallet. Medieval kings didn’t lack peasant-fodder to fill out their armies, but paying for the logistics of war – horses, food and weapons – bankrupted many a kingdom and compelled many a bellicose monarch to make peace. America has the physical resources to build an armada of aircraft carriers and stealth bombers, but that’s cold comfort to a Pentagon that’s busy downsizing because the defense budget is being slashed. Yet one never hears that the USS Enterprise had to abort its five-year mission to three years because Starfleet Command’s budget was slashed, or half its shuttlecraft are down because there is no money for spare parts. Babylon 5′s overworked space station commander did have to deal with budget cuts, and one would hate to be the Imperial accountant who has to confront Darth Vader with Death Star cost overruns (“your lack of funding disturbs me”), but otherwise there

The second Death Star under construction in Return of the Jedi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

seems to be money aplenty in SF for expensive fleets. Assuming that a technologically sophisticated, spacefaring race has an economy and a currency (certainly some mechanism to allocate resources to satisfy the needs of the population), one can only hope that any potential enemy confronting Earth would have a limited treasury.

3. Will technology or tactics determine victory in space? How many times has the Enterprise been blasted by some alien CGI Ray of Death that knifes through the deflector shields like butter? In reality, technological surprise does happen: the Aztecs encountering Spanish gunpowder and horses, or European knights encountering Mongolian horse archers. But victorious nations tend to be not those with better technology, but those who use their technology better. French tanks were superior to German tanks in 1940, but the Germans conquered France in six weeks by making better use of the tanks they had. Tactics vs. technology is a difficult issue in SF, because the environment inherently favors technology; tech is needed to keep humans alive in space, to travel between worlds, and a primitive sublight missile fired at a ship traveling faster than light probably won’t hit its target. While clever tactics are certainly a major plot point in SF, whether it’s Kirk’s Corbomite ruse or Luke Skywalker penetrating the Death Star’s weak spot, superior technology seems to rule the day. The clever Zulus defeated the technologically superior British at Isandlwana, but I’d still hate to pit a spear against an M-1 tank, let alone an Imperial Star Destroyer.

4. Are there universal truths in space warfare? In speculative fiction like SF, so much depends on the assumptions made by the authors, but even assumptions are usually based on physical laws. Do the laws and logic of the universe favor certain tactics and technologies, such that an alien race adhering to logic (as humans know it) would be compelled to adopt them? Perhaps the physics and economics of space will tend to favor carriers equipped with fighters, or giant battleships, or hordes of smaller craft. If there are truths, then the nature of space warfare will be predictable. If not, the combatants will learn the hard way.

5. How will aliens fight in space? The cardinal sin of military history is assuming that your enemy will fight as you do and with the same weapons. The weapons of the Alliance and the Empire seemed mostly identical in Star Wars, as did Federation phasers and Klingon disruptors. That’s no surprise, given the inevitable diffusion of military technology (or as Spock told the Romulan commander, “military secrets are the most fleeting of all” ). It’s interesting that 2005′s War of the Worlds had the aliens using energy fields to knock out Earth’s devices, in the same way that the Americans and Soviets would have used electromagnetic pulses from nuclear weapons to disrupt each other’s weapons and infrastructure, or how the U.S. used graphite bombs to take down the Iraqi and Serbian electrical grids. I suspect that if many of us were to conceive of space warfare, it would resemble early 21st Century warfare, with lots of drones, cyberwarfare, and so on. A hundred years ago, it would have been airships and dreadnoughts. Should Earth encounter a hostile alien power, our admirals and scientists will have to guess – just as they do now – how and with what weapons the enemy will fight. Based on recent American history, I suspect they will either assume the enemy will fight as humans will fight, or they will credit the enemy with capabilities that would only exist if we were fighting the planet Krypton.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this. I’ll be returning to the crossroads of SF and current military technology and tactics. For updates, follow me on Twitter at @mipeck1

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Those are all good questions. I’ll point out that your comment in #4 that it all depends on the assumptions really applies to all of those questions. That’s why I usually avoid the discussions about what is “realistic,” as they devolve into what SFConsim-L calls “Green vs Purple debates.” (The phrase comes from an episode of Bablyon 5 involving a civil war among one of the aline species; in attempting to mediate the conflict, the protagonists discover they are fighting over the randomly selected colors of the sash they each wear. It was about periodic survival of the fittest contests, not politics.) A GvP debate is one where the going in assumptions really determine the outcome, and the assumptions themselves are essentially unverifiable.

Unless your discussing the next 30 years or so, the assumptions dominate.

My own UFO story here in San Diego has won front page coverage in every newspaper in town as well as numerous radio and TV interviews. And for good reason, my accidental photo of 10 daylight UFOs has produced a pattern also found in numerous other UFO photos as well as countless ancient artifacts and the Nazca Lines in Peru. The LA Times labeled the evidence on my non-profit website and YouTube video “UNSETTLING”. Just Google my name “Mike Orrell”or “Inaja UFO Photo” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbszqFRYaVY

After my 1992 Beach & Bay Press featured article numerous people with their own UFO stories contacted me. One of these was a retired business man who recounted a story decades old where a business deal introduced him to a man who revealed a harrowing event that took place in the fifty’s when he worked as security at Edwards Air Force Base. In the middle of the night sirens blared and they raced to a hanger only to discover a giant UFO hovering outside the hanger door. They were ordered by the Sargent to open fire on the craft which they did. The man reported that the craft absorbed the bullets then a panel in the craft opened up and a beam shot out and atomized the Sargent into dust.

All the security personal were debriefed and sworn to secrecy for 10 years which had elapsed. They later discovered that inside the hanger was a captured UFO. The point of the story is if they wanted to annihilate us they could have already. Furthermore it has been reported by Ed Grimsley that UFOs seem to be battling each other in outer space as he has witnessed through his night vision binoculars. I recently attended a “skywatch with Ed and Ben Hansen and saw a delta shaped object with the very expensive binoculars. The “good aliens” may be protecting us from the bad aliens.

in my opinion, i think if there was an outside threat to earth, the tactic would be really, really simple:

just defoliate the planet. kill off the plants and everything else goes with it. then the planet is free for the taking. why fire a single round? waste of energy and resources.

in re: stellar combat. my opinion here is that it would be akin to submarine combat. in fact, to my way of thinking, large ships fighting in space would be very similar to submarine combat in that you aren’t dealing with projectile weapons that rely on line of sight so much as targeting systems. i don’t think it would be 2 ships fighting in a “broadsides” battle so much as constant targeting of scanned objects and with the expense of ammo in space, you aren’t going to fire volleys so much as a single VERY well aimed shot.

in the end, instead of projectiles, wouldn’t it be easier to just “push” the enemy away, deep into space, rather then try to destroy them?

Great articles here and at FP. The challenge with depicting warfare in space is that most people (not just writers) have very little knowledge or clear understanding of the real physics of space so we tend to enforce our “known” world onto this unknown one in order for it to make sense. That explains why most tv shows tend to show spaceships in fleet with a common orientation (hull down / turrent up, if you will) even though there is no “up” in space, and why dog-fighting tends to follow an “get on his six o’clock” model. Just as troublesome is weapon damage. IIRC, I think I saw nukes used on Battlestar. Great visual effect, but consider the physics of that: weapon detonates sending pieces of debris flying off at pretty close to the speed of light in a 360 degree sphere with nothing (friction / gravity) to slow the speed of said debris. But because we really don’t have a practical example of what kind of energy hex nut has when it is travelling at 299,999 m/s, it’s difficult to imagine the kind of damage it will have when it hits something (hint: not good). IIRC…the window on one of the space shuttles received some fairly significant damage from a paint chip (which was probably travelling at a relative speed of 33,000 mph). It’s also interesting to see how ship design plays into sci-fi war. The pressure difference between the inside and outside of a spaceship is only 1 atmosphere, so hull bulk is really only necessary if that ship is travelling in / out of planetary atmospheres (where speed+density=friction). Compare that to the pressure difference in naval vessels, where ships have tremendous weight / pressure differences. Again IIRC, weapons like the mark 48 torpedo use hydraulic pressure to cause damage to the ship (“lift” the middle and the weight of the bow and stern literally break the back). Point being…why aren’t more spaceships lightly armored as opposed to heavy behemoths?

The trouble with space combat is that space is big and ships are small targets. The sphere that a ship can occupy (assuming it is not just playing sitting duck) is pretty large even for light speed weapons like lasers. Combat is likely to be guided weapons or weapons that pepper an area with shots.

You also have to deliver enough energy in a small enough area that you don’t just warm up the enemy’s ship. That usually means a projectile impact or near hit with nuke or fragmentary explosives.